Like many
writing projects, those in my job involve clearly communicating a purpose and a
rationale to a specific audience and require a lot of reflection. For instance,
at Susquehanna University, I teach an education course for science majors who
are planning to become certified teachers that they take before student
teaching. For that class, I write curricula that need to function as a model
for how I want my students to learn to write curricula. How can I clearly
communicate to my students exactly what I expect? Can I anticipate problems and
revise my materials to prevent them? How can I teach my students to do that in
their own writing of assignments, labs, tests, etc.? One way is by showing them
drafts of my course materials, and discussing and evaluating the changes that
I’ve made over time. I also ask them to reflect with me after each assignment,
“how could that have been written better to make it clearer to you what you
needed to accomplish to be successful?” This interaction leads naturally to a
workshop-type environment with their own work as well, where we read and write
to clarify our purpose to our audiences, whether it’s a principal or a middle
school science student.

I also run
the Student Learning Support programs at Bucknell. In that role, my writing
projects are focused around communicating with professors, my student staff,
and the students who participate in my programs. Balancing a welcoming tone
with serious content can be a challenge.

What do you love about it?

I love that
while my materials probably won’t ever become “perfect,” they almost always get
better as I continue to reflect and work on them.

What kind of feedback on your writing
do you find most helpful?

I really
appreciate both emotional and technical feedback on my writing. If I’ve made a
grammatical or spelling error, I definitely want to know! But more useful in
some ways, and harder to gauge, is the emotional impact. Was information
presented in a clear and relevant way to increase interest? Were connections or themes, as well as details or examples, both obvious and significant? Was the
assignment’s purpose and structure clear enough to make you feel empowered to
do what was asked of you? Was it encouraging and helpful? Did it make you want
to continue working and/or communicating? Those are some of my most important
goals.

What would you like students to know
about you as a writer?

When I worked
as a full time teacher, I considered myself only a writer of curricula, not a
“real” writer. But in my job now, I sometimes write 10+ document pages of email
content every day to students, staff, faculty, and administrators. I want that
writing to be useful, clear, and positive. Everybody writes, and so everybody
is a writer. It doesn’t have to be something destined for publication to be
important, and it is all worthy of continued reflection.

For more information about Laura and the Teaching and Learning Center, see

I am working on what
seems like a never-ending revision of an article. It was a dissertation
chapter so I needed to cut over twenty pages and focus my argument.
Precision is not my forte, so this has been a challenge. I also just
finished a session proposal for a conference I hope to attend next November.
That was a bit easier but also called for precision.

What do you love
about it?

What I love about the
chapter I am turning into an article is the close readings of the text I
offer. I believe they provide a new way to read the novel that in turn
forces readers and critics alike to understand the novel -- and its place in
literary history -- differently. It has been fun to incorporate the
author's satire and humor into my argument, unpacking the humor for my readers
and poking fun at the author as well.

What about it (if
anything) is driving you nuts?

What is driving me
nuts is that it *still* is not finished!

How would you describe
your writing process?

My writing process is
slow. I write a great deal, and I tend to verbosity. So I write and
write and write. Then revise and revise and revise. I suppose I
would say my writing process is actually a revision process. It is in the
revision process, at least for me, that the *work* of critical thinking and
critical writing really happens.

What kind of feedback
on your writing do you find most helpful?

There are two types
of feedback I find most helpful. Early in the writing process, I benefit
from talking about my project: reading my first draft out loud with someone and
talking about the ideas, the claims, and the structure. The global
issues. Later in process, when I've gotten my writing in a more
manageable form, I like to read it out loud with a pencil, working closely at
the sentence level, making sure my form facilitates my content, especially on
the sentence level.

What
would you like your students to know about you as a writer?

That writing for me
*is* revising. In other words, I never hand in my first draft!

Erica Delsandro received her
doctoral degree in English Literature from Washington University in St. Louis
in 2011 with a dissertation entitled “National History and the Novel in 1930s
Britain.” She also received an M.A. in
English Literature from Bucknell University in 2005 and a B.A. with honors in
English Literature and History from Bucknell in 2002.

Erica’s research interests
coalesce around the interwar novel in Britain, gender and national identity,
and the intersection of historiography and literature.

I’m currently in the middle of a project that is
examining department chairs’ views of academic assessment in a local college.
Academic assessment has become an important focus in higher education as
some educational leaders have begun to question whether students are really
learning what we think they are. This was a subject that I worked on a lot over
the last 4-5 years as an associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences,
and now I’m trying to take a step back from that direct involvement and
understand better the experience of those individuals who have the direct responsibility
for implementing various systems for assessing student learning within their
departments.

What do
you love about it?

I have enjoyed talking with the chairs about
their work. Through our conversations I have been able to get new insights in the
challenges posed by assessment and the various ways that departments have
sought to address those challenges. I like the way the project is forcing
me reconcile the experiences of the chairs with more overarching theories that
seek to explain the growing emphasis on accountability in organizations ranging
from schools to prisons.

What about
it (if anything) is driving you nuts?

The analysis of the data itself can become
fairly tedious. Looking at the transcripts of my interviews for common
themes takes a long time, and I sometimes find myself losing focus. So, while I
like knowing what people think, having to characterize that thinking in a
systematic and defensible way is a really tough job.

How would
you describe your writing process?

Generally, I’m someone who likes to start with
the general and work toward the specific. In my writing this sometimes
means spending a lot of time considering the general context of the issue that
I am trying to write about before getting to the specific question that I want
to explore. While this is really good for my thinking, it doesn’t always work
for a typical chapter or journal article, so I end up cutting a lot of that
material later in the process after I’ve clarified the focus of the piece.

What kind
of feedback on your writing do you find most helpful?

I’ve really benefited from reading my work out
loud to someone (often Peg Cronin in the Writing Center) who is willing to
listen and ask questions. The questions asked by a listener often show me where
I have left my audience in the lurch and have more explaining to do. This
is particularly true with transitions, where I am prone to jump from one topic
to another thinking that the relationship between the ideas is clear even when
it’s not. Having a listener say that she doesn’t understand how I got from
point A to point B is helpful because it makes me think more clearly about that
relationship and how to explain it. I also find that reading things out
loud helps me to think more about the overall structure of the article and
helps me to find grammatical errors and typos.

What would
you like students to know about you as a writer?

I would like students to know that I work very
hard at my writing because it does not come naturally to me. When I was in
college, I received some really mean- spirited feedback about my writing from a
professor, and I found it to be paralyzing. Since then, I’ve learned how
to parse mean-spirited feedback from feedback that is meant to help my writing
and my thinking improve, and I focus on the latter. I think students would be
well advised to take a similar approach -- try to focus on what is actionable
in the comments provided by your professors. Try to pay attention to what
the reader thinks could be made better (even if it is hard to hear) and let the
mean-spirited comments go.

Abe
Feuerstein studies issues related to local educational politics,
interest groups, and school reform. He started teaching at Bucknell
University in the fall of 1996. After gaining tenure in 2002,he served for
six years as chair of Bucknell’s Education Department. He then served as
Associate Dean of Faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences between 2008
and 2013. He holds a Ph.D. and M.Ed. in Educational Leadership and Policy
Studies from the University of Virginia. Prior to teaching at Bucknell,
he worked in both private and public schools as a chemistry teacher and
school administrator.

About Me

Everybody at Bucknell writes--students, faculty, staff, Bio majors, engineers, historians, poets, chemists. Alumni write, too. All kinds of writing matter here.
Bucknell Writes has two main goals: to highlight writers and writing at Bucknell and to share ideas and information that may interest our community.
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